Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (10 page)

In one case in 17th-century Mexico, an important Spanish
functionary from Mexico City was on his way to rejoin his invalid wife at a
small town in the countryside when he became involved in an illicit
relationship with a young woman of the family where he found lodging in Puebla.
The functionary, named Francisco, stayed a few months, and eventually the
woman’s relatives began to pressure him to marry her, even going so far as to
misinform him that his wife had died. When Francisco attempted an escape, he
found himself facing the woman’s angry brothers, armed and ready to kill him if
he did not marry her. The woman’s family brought a magistrate to the house in
the middle of the night to take Francisco off to jail, and the marriage was
quickly arranged. After marrying his lover, a woman quite below his status as
he saw it, Francisco was free to leave town, which he hastened to do. He was
never to see his new wife again, but this was irrelevant to the men of her
family since they had rescued their honor by forcing Francisco to do his duty.
We do not know how the young woman may have felt, now joined to a husband she
would never see again and therefore prevented from marrying someone with whom
she might have been able to make a good life.

Premarital Sex and Fatherhood

For every child born outside marriage, there were two
parents, but of the two, the father paid the lesser price by far. Having a
child out of wedlock was not, in and of itself, a blot on his honor. Indeed,
while the unwed mother attempted to hide her status as a parent, the newborn’s
father might celebrate the birth of a child, in spite of its illegitimacy. This
may be attributed in part to the legal apparatus, based on the
Siete
Partidas,
the medieval Spanish law code that exempted men from the
obligation of recognizing a child born outside marriage. Laws that left women
and children unprotected in this way were based on the assumption that an
unmarried woman who engaged in a sexual relationship was not an honorable
person, so there was no way the father could be sure the child was actually
his.

When a man lost honor, it was usually because of his
reputation in his professional life and his business dealings. A man’s honor
depended on his honesty and reliability, on being faithful to his word.
Breaking a contract could mean a loss of honor for a man, and since a promise
of marriage was a form of contract, breaking it could tarnish his reputation.
Sometimes an engagement lasted a long time, and several children might be
produced before a man broke off the relationship, possibly to return to Spain
or to accept an assignment in a different area of the viceroyalty. In this situation,
the problem would not be his treatment of the woman involved, but rather the
fact that he had given his word to marry and then gone back on it. This
difference between the social status of unmarried parents also suggests that
men were less fettered by community pressures since they tended to move around
more than women, especially a woman with children who needed the support of her
family and a stable life for her children.

Although a man might not recognize and legitimate his
child, he was responsible for what was known as
crianza,
raising and
providing for his children. If he failed to carry out this responsibility, he
might lose honor. His main problem, though, if he did not recognize his child,
would be confronting his child’s loss of honor, the unlikelihood that his male
child would be eligible for a professional or military career and that his
female child might contract a favorable marriage.

EXTRAMARITAL SEX

Widows

In some cases, virginity was not an issue because the
bride-to-be was a widow. In these cases, the documents show that attraction and
what was characterized as human weakness, combined with availability or
considerations of survival, led to sexual relationships outside marriage. In
one case, a man sought a waiver in order to marry his brother’s widow who was
about 10 years older than he and had seven children; the couple had already
begun a sexual relationship. Testimony shows that the deceased husband, after
realizing that he was ill and probably dying, had invited his brother into the
house to help his wife manage her property. It seems the dying husband in this
case supplied his own replacement, and his brother and widow were agreeable to
this arrangement. In another case, a young indigenous man with no financial
resources of his own applied for a waiver to marry his employer, a
mestiza
13
years older than he. He stated that he expected to be fired if he did not marry
her. For her part, his employer stated that she wished to marry the young man,
with whom she had been carrying on a relationship for a year, because if they
did not marry she would be forced to fire him, find a replacement, and run the
same risk with the new employee. What emerges in these cases is that rural
common people paid little attention to the rigid rules of sexual behavior the
church attempted to impose on their lives. The snippets of rural life we see in
these applications for waivers of impediments to marriage indicate high levels
of both premarital and extramarital sexual activity during the colonial period,
in spite of the best efforts of the priests to restrict it.

Slavery

Although the chapter on marriage and the family shows that
some slaveholders encouraged marriage between their workers, other owners found
it unnecessary and inconvenient to allow their workers to marry, possibly
because marriage could be interpreted as an obstacle in separating couples from
each other and children from their parents at the time of sale or inheritance.
In addition, a plantation owner’s unrestricted access to his female slaves
could be made more difficult, possibly even more dangerous, if the women were
married. Not surprisingly, slaveholders were fond of ascribing loose morals to
their workers and liked to blame enslaved women, married or not, for enticing
their masters. While the true nature of such master-slave sexual relationships
is often difficult to gauge and undoubtedly varied widely depending on specific
circumstances, the power of the slaveholder was always an important factor in
shaping them.

Meanwhile, there is evidence of strong affective life
within the community of enslaved workers itself. An English manager of a sugar
mill in early 19th-century Brazil noted that men sometimes risked severe
punishment to sneak off to another estate to visit the object of their
affections after a hard day’s work. He wrote of their “determination that the
feelings of the heart shall not be controlled.”  Records from a Jesuit
plantation show that although the workforce was supposed to be locked up at
night, it was fairly easy to slip away; the administrator attempted to correct
this by applying the whip to young men who had been caught taking off at night.
While recent research into the lives of enslaved workers has shown that
marriages were more common than historians previously believed, married or not,
the workers preferred to live in couples if the male–female ratio on the
plantation made that possible. Female-headed households were abnormal, rather
than the norm, and less than 10 percent of the slaves lived alone.

Adultery

In addition to showing the frequency of premarital sex, the
applications to marry mentioned earlier also reveal many people engaged in
sexual relationships with partners who were already married to someone else.
According to the usual definition of adultery, a married
woman
had to be
involved. Monogamy was neither practiced by nor expected of men, in spite of
the best efforts of the church. Although religious workers struggled mightily
to encourage, even enforce, monogamy among all their parishioners, they had
little hold over men of the popular classes. What is somewhat more surprising
is the evidence of married women choosing sexual partners outside their
marriage, and often not for any apparent economic reason. While in some cases a
woman may have engaged in an adulterous relationship almost as a form of
insurance in the event of the death of her husband, at other times women seem
not to have had any hidden motive, but simply to have acted on an attraction.
Even more surprising, the evidence does not show that adultery necessarily led
to separation of the couple or couples involved. We do not, of course, know how
conjugal relations suffered as a result of the adultery of a partner, but often
adultery did not terminate marriage. Women’s essential role in the production
and reproduction of peasant life seems to have given them a little power over
their own lives by reducing somewhat their husbands’ control over their
activities. Put another way, a wife was a necessity in the peasant household,
and in rural villages finding a partner was not easy. A sexual transgression
might not warrant the termination of an otherwise workable home life.

A long and interesting court case from a town on the
highway between Guatemala City and San Salvador in the 1780s displays many
features common to adulterous relationships. The aggrieved husband, Juan
Francisco Pineda, brought a case against his wife’s lover, Manuel Mendizábal,
who worked for Pineda from time to time. Pineda was a successful farmer and
owner of a mule train; the 25-year-old Mendizábal, who identified himself as a
musician, did various odd jobs including working as a mule driver for Pineda.
The relationship between Mendizábal and Pineda’s wife, Petrona Rustrián,
apparently continued for some years, leading to various arrests for Mendizábal
and just as many jailbreaks. Several times the authorities succeeded in
catching Manuel and Petrona practically in the act, once finding Manuel hiding
in the bed of Petrona’s young son,
under
the child. He had forgotten to
move his clothes, however, which were found neatly folded at the head of
Petrona’s bed. Once locked up, Mendizábal would usually write to Petrona,
expressing his love for her and asking for her help in contacting people who
might facilitate his release. In one of these letters, addressed “Dear jewel of
my heart and all my love,” Manuel told Petrona, “Although enduring my
misfortune in this dismal prison, I remain your
negro
(your man,
husband) and faithful to my little cutie, my soul cherishes you, don’t forget me.
. . .” He went on to ask her to collect a debt from someone who owed him money
so he could eat better in jail. Manuel finished the note, “your devoted slave
who yearns to see you more than to write you. You well know his name.” It is
interesting to observe that this drifter seems to have been able to write the
note himself, but Petrona could not read it and so asked a male neighbor to
read it for her, paying him with a measure of maize. The neighbor, loyal to his
gender, told Pineda who seized the note as evidence, notwithstanding Manuel’s
attempt at anonymity. 

Various features of this case make it typical of adultery
cases. First, Pineda was related to the mayor, giving him a realistic hope of
winning the case. He ranked high in the rural socioeconomic hierarchy, while
Manuel was a floater who relied in part on his appeal to women for his
livelihood—he was once arrested in the house of a local widow. Also typical is
the fact that after the case got to court Petrona chose to sell out her lover
and stay with her husband, certainly the more practical option. Indeed, Petrona
told the court that her husband had pardoned her in the past for her
relationship with Manuel and seemed to be willing to do so again as long as she
repudiated the relationship with Manuel. What her husband seemed most upset
about was that she had given Manuel a blanket and some clothing and that she
regularly washed his clothes down at the river and sent his meals to wherever
he was working. Here the husband showed more concern for the misuse of his
hard-earned assets than for the chastity of his wife. And in the end, the
adulterous relationship did not end Petrona’s marriage. While Catholic marriage
was supposed to be both lifelong and monogamous, it seems the lifelong element
may have weighed more heavily than monogamy. Since the married couple was the
basic building block of a stable, moral society, the sin of adultery could be
forgiven, while separation, more threatening to the social system, could not be
tolerated.

At times, adultery led to hidden blood relationships that
could not be untangled, and dispensation of an impediment was sought just on
the chance that one existed. This situation occurred in a case in which parents
of both the bride-to-be and her suitor were suspected of having been fathered
by men other than their mothers’ husbands, which would have meant that the
couple was related by blood. Since the rate of births outside marriage in many
rural areas hovered around 30 percent, many children did not know the identity
of their fathers. When they reached the age of marriage, they were sometimes
surprised to learn of a blood relationship with their intended partner. If they
themselves were unaware of a possible relationship, the community gossips could
be depended upon to supply the information to the priest with alacrity upon
hearing the announcement of the intended marriage.

At times, two married people would exchange a promise of
marriage if both should become unattached. A couple engaged in an adulterous
relationship might thereby provoke the impediment of
crimen,
meaning
that they had promised to marry while one or both parties were still married to
other people. Applications for dispensation of this impediment show a fear of
the immiseration that was the likely result of being left without a partner,
but planning to marry one’s sexual partner, even if the current partner was at
death’s door, was a violation of canon law.